[John Whitworth]

The Year of the Bear Speccie Competition is asking for a monorhyme, and some of you responded. I wonder whether you know any other examples of this form that aren't just silly. I've found a charming one by Dick Davis, which appeared in the Hudson Review. It is called 'A Monorhyme for the Shower' and can easily be googled. I would print it here but I'm not exactly sure about the copyright implications. I need a ruling from wiser heads than mine.

I wrote a Bear monorhyme and, trying to tackle the competition that asks for a poem on Stone, found myself writing another. Somebody on google says that Theodore Roethke's 'The Sloth' is a monorhyme but it is not. Do any of you know any good ones. Here is my 'Stone Variations'. Sam Gwynn suggests it ought to be called 'Stoned'. But there is a deep meaning in there somewhere and if I don't myself know what it is... Well, I have entered it and when I win I hall tell you what it means.

Stone Variations

He moved by night. He went alone.
He crept through corridors of stone
Into her reveries of bone.

He’d drawn a blank. The bird had flown.
His friends were fled, his cover blown
And this time he was on his own.

In Peter’s Chair the Pope was Joan.
She cursed him in an undertone:
You reap the crap that you have sown.

He wouldn’t listen to the crone.
He heard his own testosterone.
Out there beyond the panic zone

The night shone sharp as silicone,
A scattering of starlight thrown
Across the void of the unknown,

The wind became a sousaphone
Beneath the howling of the drone,
His homicidal chaperon.

Her wildernesses overgrown,
Her staunch, indomitable moan,
He guessed, though he was never shown.

He moved by night. He went alone.